Carlos Fuentes

This eBook edition of Carlos Fuentes' novel includes only the English translation by Lysander Kemp. The Spanish text is not included.

Felipe Montero is employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband's memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

The Good Conscience is Carlos Fuentes's second novel. The scene is Guanajuato, a provincial capital in Central Mexico, once one of the world's richest mining centers. The Ceballos family has been reinstated to power, and adolescent Jaime Ceballos, its only heir, is torn between the practical reality of his family's life and the idealism of his youth and his Catholic education. His father is a good man but weak; his uncle is powerful, yet his actions are inconsistent with his professed beliefs. Jaime's struggle to emerge as a man with a "good conscience" forms the theme of the book: can a rebel correct the evils of an established system and at the same time retain the integrity of his principles?

As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes's masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.

The nine stories comprising The Crystal Frontier, a brilliant work of fiction from Carlos Fuentes, all concern people who in one way or another have had something to do with, or still are part of, the family of one Leonardo Barroso, a powerful oligarch of northern Mexico with manifold connections to the United States.

In The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes brings the Mexico of 1916 uncannily to life. This novel is wise book, full of toughness and humanity and is without question one of the finest works of modern Latin American fiction.

One of Fuentes's greatest works, the novel tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa's soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.

Where, Carlos Fuentes asks, is a modern-day vampire to roost? Why not Mexico City, populated by ten million blood sausages (that is, people), and a police force who won’t mind a few disappearances?“Vlad” is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic cruelty was an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In this sly sequel, Vlad really is undead: dispossessed after centuries of mayhem by Eastern European wars and rampant blood shortages. More than a postmodern riff on “the vampire craze,” Vlad is also an anatomy of the Mexican bourgeoisie, as well as our culture’s ways of dealing with death. For—as in Dracula—Vlad has need of both a lawyer and a real-estate agent in order to establish his new kingdom, and Yves Navarro and his wife Asunción fit the bill nicely. Having recently lost a son, might they not welcome the chance to see their remaining child live forever? More importantly, are the pleasures of middle-class life enough to keep one from joining the legions of the damned?

A radiant and epic new novel that is among the finest achievements of Mexico's greatest man of letters.

The Years With Laura Diaz is Carlos Fuentes' most important novel in several decades. Like his masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and moves to Mexico City--tracing a migration during the Revolution and its aftermath that was a feature of Mexico's demographic history and that is a significant element in Fuentes's fictional world.

Now the principle figure is not Artemio Cruz (who, however, makes a brief appearance) but Fuentes's first major female protagonist, the extraordinary Laura Diaz. Carlos Fuentes's richly woven narrative tapestry-filled with a multitude of dramatic scenes both witty, amusing, and heartbreaking-shows us this wonderful creature as she grows into a politically committed artist who is also a wife and mother, a lover of great men, a complicated and alluring heroine whose brave honesty prevails despite her losing a son and grandson to the darkest forces of Mexico's repressive, corrupt regimes. In the end, Laura Diaz herself dies, after a life filled with tragedy and loss, but she is a happy woman, for she has borne witness to, and helped to affect, the course of history and has vindicated the aims and intentions of the highest art.

The internationally acclaimed author Carlos Fuentes, winner of the Cervantes Prize and the Latin Civilization Award, delivers a stunning work of fiction about family and love across an expanse of Mexican life, reminding us why he has been called “a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen” (Newsweek).

In these masterly vignettes, Fuentes explores Tolstoy’s classic observation that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In “A Family Like Any Other,” each member of the Pagan family lives in isolation, despite sharing a tiny house. In “The Mariachi’s Mother,” the limitless devotion of a woman is revealed as she secretly tends to her estranged son’s wounds. “Sweethearts” reunites old lovers unexpectedly and opens up the possibilities for other lives and other loves. These are just a few of the remarkable stories in Happy Families, but they all inhabit Fuentes’s trademark Mexico, where modern obsessions bump up against those of the mythic past, and the result is a triumphant display of the many ways we reach out to one another and find salvation through irrepressible acts of love.

In this spectacular translation, the acclaimed Edith Grossman captures the full weight of Fuentes’s range. Whether writing in the language of the street or in straightforward, elegant prose, Fuentes gives us stories connected by love, including the failure of love–between spouses, lovers, parents and children, siblings. From the Mexican presidential palace to the novels of the poor and the vast expanse of humanity in between, Happy Families is a magnificent portrait of modern life in all its complicated beauty, as told by one of the world’s most celebrated writers.

Praise for Carlos FuentesWinner of the Cervantes Prize

The Old Gringo

“A dazzling novel that possesses the weight and resonance of myth [and] the fierce magic of a remembered dream.”–The New York Times

The Death of Artemio Cruz

“Remarkable in the scope of the human drama it pictures, the corrosive satire and sharp dialogue.”–The New York Times Book Review

The Years with Laura Díaz

“Reading this magnificent novel is like standing beneath the dome of the Sistine Chapel. . . . The breadth and enormity of this accomplishment is breathtaking.”–The Denver Post

This I Believe

“Engaging, offering surprising conclusions, provocations or turns of phrase . . . Put down the page-turner and dare to drink these full-bodied, red, shining words.”–Los Angeles Times Book Review

In this masterly, deeply personal, and provocative book, the internationally renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, whose work has been called “a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen” (Newsweek), steps back to survey the wellsprings of art and ideology, the events that have shaped our time, and his extraordinary life and fiercest passions.

Arranged alphabetically from “Amore” to “Zurich,” This I Believe takes us on a marvelous inner journey with a great writer. Fuentes ranges wide, from contradictions inherent in Latin American culture and politics to his long friendship with director Luis Buñuel.

Along the way, we find reflection on the mixed curse and blessing of globalization; memories of a sexual initiation in Zurich; a fond tracing of a family tree heavy with poets, dreamers, and diplomats; evocations of the streets, cafés, and bedrooms of Washington, Paris, Santiago de Chile, Cambridge, Oaxaca, and New York; and a celebration of literary heroes including Balzac, Cervantes, Faulkner, Kafka, and Shakespeare. Throughout, Fuentes captivates with the power of his intellect and his prose.

Here, too, are vivid, often heartbreaking glimpses into his personal life. “Silvia” is a powerful love letter to his beloved wife. In “Children,” Fuentes recalls the births of his daughters and the tragic death of his son; in “Cinema” he relives the magic of films such as Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz. Further extending his reach, he examines the collision between history and contemporary life in “Civil Society,” “Left,” and “Revolution.”

And he poignantly addresses the experiences we all hold in common as he grapples with beauty, death, freedom, God, and sex. By turns provocative and intimate, partisan and universal, this book is a brilliant summation of an international literary career. Revisiting the influences, commitments, readings, and insights of a lifetime, Fuentes has fashioned a magnificently coherent statement of his view of the world, reminding us once again why reading Fuentes is “like standing beneath the dome of the Sistine Chapel. . . . The breadth and enormity of this accomplishment is breathtaking” (The Denver Post).

In the essays in A New Time for Mexico, Carlos Fuentes discusses the history, origins and nature of Mexico's political system and the unforeseen, tumultuous events that began in 1994 with the rebellion in Chiapas and continued with a rash of assassinations, the break between presidents Salinas and Zedillo, and continual traumas for a society making the transition from authoritarian to democratic politics.

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